


hairéō

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: ...harrowtic?, Canon-Typical Body Horror, Canonical pyschosis, Gen, Hallucinations, Mental Instability, Nobody cares like a heretic, Spoilers for HtN
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:21:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25709656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: When you can’t believe yourself, what do you believe in?Nobody cares like a heretic
Relationships: Gideon Nav & Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Harrowhark Nonagesimus/The Body
Comments: 8
Kudos: 77





	hairéō

**Author's Note:**

> “heresy”;  
> Borrowed from Old French heresie (modern hérésie), from Latin haeresis, from Ancient Greek αἵρεσις (haíresis, “choice, system of principles”), from αἱρέομαι (hairéomai, “to take for oneself, to choose”), the middle voice of αἱρέω (hairéō, “to take”)

> “Heretics give meaning to the defenders of the faith. Nobody cares more than a heretic.”
> 
> -tom stoppard

You keep the faith. You keep it locked inside your sternum, in the marrow of your skull, in the soft wet runnels of your maggot-mad brain. You watch the Faith follow you, and God does not see it.

Faith is a body of knowledge, a body of believers. Faith is The Body.

It’s just that you are two hundred corpses, and so, naturally, only a corpse could love you. Only a dead girl loves a dead girl, only a monster loves a monster, and this catechism, to you, makes perfect sense. The way is shut. It was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it. Your body belongs to the dead. To The Body.

It is a heresy. It is a heresy, and a heresy means, in a language as dead as you are, “to take”. You are a grave-robber. You are a grave. You are a hole, and a hole is not its own thing, and if you catch any part of yourself thinking  _ hah,  _ **_hole_ ** , you will rip it out by the teeth and consign it to the blackest, bleakest death you know. A hole is an aspect of something else, an ontological parasite. You are not whole.

The Body could not fill you, and to think so is insane. You are insane. You have been a dead girl since you were born, since before you were born, and you are a mad, heretic anchorite, and The Body must know this, and The Body, alone in the whole universe, does not care.

The Body does not pity you. This is a great comfort, sometimes.

* * *

Faith without works is dead, as the Body is Dead, and so you work in the name of God, instead.

You are not a very good saint. You doubt too much—your senses, yourself. You beg to see the wounds on The Body, you love the wounds like the penitent loves the lash, like the anchorite loves her cell, and love is all of these things, and none of these things. Love is a dead girl. Love is a tomb. Love  _ is  _ a marble arch, bone-warded up to fuck. Love is weal on a wrist, as of a chain, love is sending a thin, hot line of blood running down from your ear canal, which is a thing which happens to you often, now. Love makes you very stupid. Love’s a bitch.

Still.

You love God, because he put Her away, which made Her dead, which made Her yours, and you love God because He is God, and you hate Him because he is kind to you. Tries to be; God is not good at being kind. It is not a sacrament you ever learned to take.

You keep the Faith. You pray. You pray with the fervent, febrile hope that your prayers will go unanswered, so that you will have to pray again. You keep the Faith in your bleeding fingers, in the mean little bullet of your pisiform, because counting the rosary gives you something to do with your hands. Because the idea that God loved a person, and lost a person, and was ever a person is enough to fracture the femurs of your belief and leave you hobbled on the ground, suddenly agnostic, with the points shearing up through your skin for the stupidest possible fucking reason.

The difference between heresy and blasphemy is a degree of respect, and a matter of deviance.

You are a deviant.

You are a dead girl, but you aren’t, because you can’t be, because you are a ransom. You are a war crime. You are a mortgage. You cost too much to die, and so you are not dead, and this is why you will never stand in the Presence, because you are dead, but you aren’t but you are but you’re not and if you weren’t already crazier than a box of wasps on cocaine, the schizoid recursion of it all would get you there, and anyway, you always thought that having a body at all was vaguely insulting. The idea that your—everything— _ everything _ that you are, should be caged inside so much wet meat, a catastrophe of oozes and subjectivity—always felt somehow obscene.

You cannot believe in yourself. You cannot believe yourself. You believe in Her instead. 

You keep the Faith.

**Author's Note:**

> Hit a bitch up on twitter @gin_n_chthonic


End file.
